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Sunday, February 23, 2014

I have been staying in Whampoa Drive for most of my life and it's a pretty small housing estate area with a small bus interchange terminal, a not-so-active Community Center, two hawker centers (one opens in the day and the other in the night where a number of food stalls selling good food) and a wet market, where all are just a couple of blocks away from my place.

If one looks closely and observe well, one can discover a number of interesting things in this small neighborhood. Well, in my case, I noticed this small little slanted tree, shown above, during my bus trip from Toa Payoh towards the bus-stop where I would alight. And I thought to myself "how come I've never seen this tree before?". So this morning with warm morning sunlight shining upon this open field where the tree is rooted right next to St. Michael bus interchange terminal. I walked there and made a few shots with my Seagull 205 RF as well as with my Samsung S3 mobile phone camera.

More pictures to show after the jump.

This is how the open field looks like. Well, just a quarter of it as shown here. It has been untouched for a long long time. Longer than I have lived in this small neighborhood. I used to live in a one-room flat which was situated just next to that HDB flat (Block 77) in the center of the panorama picture. Block number 78. There were three blocks of one-room flats; Block 78, 79 & 80. Three flats were demolished in the late 90s. The Town Council built a new office building and numbered it Block 80. Years later their office shifted to the Community Center and gradually NTUC Fair Price supermarket occupies Block 80 with a few other small businesses in the same building.

Currently there's a car park occupies the space where Block 79 was situated. Last year, HDB has had acquired Block 78 open space for a Build-To-Order (BTO in short) flat namely Whampoa Dew. This small 40-floors high BTO has a total of 405 units of which 249 are 4-room flats and 156 are Studio Apartment. Currently there are hoarding boards surrounds that area as shown in the panorama picture on the left background. There's a huge canal that divides Whampoa Dew and the open field.

As for the bus interchange terminal, I'm not too sure why there are hoarding boards that occupy half of the terminal. Perhaps they are renovating or maybe downsizing. I don't know. There are only a few public buses of Bus number 21, 124, 125, 131 and 186, traveling to east, west and central part of this small country island. Well it may be a small estate compared to any other estates like Toa Payoh, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Bedok, Tampines, just to name a few, but I really love this place.

OK here's another shot of a withered tree I took a few days ago, from the same open field.

Withered Tree

I was walking towards the bus stop when I saw this withered tree. The warm morning light was shining upon it and immediately I fell in love with the lighting. It made this tree look alive as it set against the fluffy clouds in the blue sky. Pity there are cluttered buildings in between.

I took the shot in HDR mode on phone camera and tweaked the color hues and saturation in Snapseed. I also tried to convert this color shot into black and white in hope to make the withered tree more outstanding. Here it is.

The best part of the picture lies on the tree trunk area. If you look closely, the image has this three-dimensional effect in par with the light quality, which in turn makes the tree stands out.

It seems like I can start on a small project based on my neighborhood. Need time to think about. So meantime do enjoy viewing the pictures as I'll be posting more from time to time.

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